Change management is most often associated with maintaining a computer infrastructure within an organization including changes to both hardware and software. As organizations and technology evolve, there is most often a need modify and/or augment existing computing infrastructure. Change management is the process of tracking and monitoring changes in order to maintain control and understand the technical progress toward delivering an acceptable end-user product. For example, a company having three employees may use and manage employee schedules within a spreadsheet such as those provided by Microsoft Excel. However, as the company grows and employees are hired, the spreadsheet may no longer be sufficient. Therefore, the company may either purchase or create new software with the sophistication required to manage a growing number of employee schedules. The actual process of migrating to a new solution may not be very complex; however, to ensure the integrity of the existing data, the process should be carefully planned and monitored, while maintaining the original artifact. There are often many other factors to consider when managing change, especially when the change has a high risk factor and/or the business value of the existing infrastructure is high.
Many organizations implement change management in different ways. Off-the-shelf software products, books and best practices have been authored by software companies, consortiums and educators to help organizations implement better change management policies. It has become increasingly important for organizations to adopt sound change management practices, as the cost associated with losses of systems and data due to unforeseen problems during change has risen proportionally with the reliance on computers and electronic information. Maintaining accurate records regarding change events typically constitutes a large part of change management. Records enable information systems specialists to diagnose problems and restore systems and data in a timely manner in the project that one or more systems or databases are lost due to a change within the infrastructure. Moreover, for organizations with established change management databases in a mainframe environment, it is often difficult to present change management information to the user in a web browser for online viewing.
Therefore, a need exists for a system and method for providing online access to change management activities where change management records and data may be stored within a mainframe computing environment. Further, a need exists to provide an interface wherein members of an enterprise may submit requests for service which would invoke computing logic and business rules to create a suitable workgroup and workflow. Further still, a need exists for a system and method for creating and maintaining repeatable practices to ensure efficiency, consistency and quality of projects and/or products resulting from requests for service.